2015 Articles

Mimecast today released results of a survey* of IT experts at organizations in the US, UK, South Africa and Australia. The results show the majority (55%) of respondents reporting an increase in the volume of whaling email attacks over the preceding …

This week, Mimecast has been exhibiting and presenting at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2015, at ExCeL London.The now seminal IT conference has, among other themes, certainly examined the practical impact of Office 365 adoption. With 70% o…

Office 365 is becoming more and more popular with businesses. However, the reason for its success – one cloud for all things – is also its biggest weakness. What happens when Office 365 goes down?Certainly Office 365 is not the only service to suffer…

As employees around the world look forward to Friday and the imminent weekend, so it seems do the scammers, hackers and cyber-gangs.
Research out from Cyren shows Friday is the peak distribution day for spam and malware, with almost 4x more mal…

Email is in the frontline in the war on cybercrime. It is often the primary access point to the outside world and brimming with valuable data, so protecting it has never been more important.Organizations have traditionally looked to the IT channel to…

Yet again, another vendor has given up on its commitment to its customers’ email security and archiving. Just as Webroot and Google had done previously, Intel Security recently announced the end of life of its McAfee SaaS Email Protection and Archivi…

The future of archiving is in the cloud and I believe on-premises storage is in rapid decline. And innovation here goes way beyond just providing safe, affordable storage.
“Archiving as a service (aka cloud archiving) has rapidly surpassed on-premise…

When conversations about technology come up between the IT security pros working on the ground and company executives, there's often a massive disconnect – neither party knows how to fluently speak the others’ language.
The IT administrator wil…

Question: what’s happened between this year’s IP EXPO Europe and last year’s? Answer: the security arms race has gone into overdrive.Twelve months seems a short time, but in that period attacking techniques have matured markedly – now hackers are reg…

You may be thinking your firewall, desktop antivirus and anti-spam gateway are protecting you, but is your organization really safe from hackers, crackers and cyber-criminals?
There is always one huge gap in your security strategy you’re overlo…

We recently released a new Targeted Threat Protection service to help protect employees from weaponized email attachments – Attachment Protect.
Malicious email attachments are a critical threat to businesses as they can easily bypass existing d…

When it comes to enterprises finding innovative ways to neutralize widespread email-based attacks, I’ve made the case before that it's employees – the same “weak links” who unknowingly click on malicious email URLs and attachm…

It’s long been said that when botnets first appeared, they were the first usable forms of cloud computing. Now with hindsight they fit the NIST definition of cloud computing very well and have become rapidly scalable and on-demand.More recently crimi…

As many began to return home from its Worldwide Partner Conference this week, Microsoft confirmed an outage of Office 365 email.According to Microsoft Support, it appears that affected users were unable to connect to the Exchange Online service, incl…

Yesterday, we announced two new measures designed to protect against spear-phishing. Attachment Protect and User Awareness reduce the threat from malware-laden attachments, and help IT teams raise employee security awareness.
Both services are availa…

The word “Partnership” is described as an agreement to cooperate and advance mutual interests. It’s a simple term but one that is often overused, and in most cases, unbalanced. As we grow-up and mature into our business lives, having trust in individ…

If you want to succeed in Australia you can’t just commit to a sales and support presence. Putting down technology roots is vital, especially if you aspire to grow government and financial services sectors.Since opening in Melbourne in July 2013, Mim…

Cyber-criminals don’t discriminate by size when it comes to selecting an organization as a target of attack. In fact, recent high-profile data breaches have taught us that mid- or smaller-sized businesses are often a target of those trying to attack …

With the threat of more power outages looming in South Africa’s future, businesses are scrambling to find ways to keep working. The topic of ‘generators’, ‘invertors’ and even Tesla’s new wonder battery seems to be on the lips of every COO, and the c…

In tennis, you never want to commit an unforced error. These are the worst kind of point-costing blunders a player can commit – the completely avoidable, self-inflicted ones that have nothing to do with the skill of the opponent or the excellence of …

A few weeks ago, I made a trip across the pond to one of the biggest U.S. security events of the year, the RSA Conference. The 400+ exhibitors pulled out all the stops, unveiling new products, displaying elaborate booth décor and giving away all sort…

It was reported earlier this month that Russian hackers accessed President Barack Obama’s email system inside the White House. When asked to comment on the attack, Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, said: “We do not believe that our c…

Cybercrime in South Africa has increased drastically, costing 0.14 percent of GDP or around R5.8 billion between 2013 and 2014, according to McAfee’s Global Cost of Cybercrime Report. Tackling this threat to our country needs a collaborative approach…

Email wasn’t designed for sending sensitive or confidential information yet it remains the most common form of communication in business. Meanwhile, traditional approaches to encryption have been costly and complex.Credit card details, personal ident…

The U.S. healthcare industry is the latest victim in a series of massive cyber-attacks. Most recently, Premera Blue Cross, a not-for-profit insurance provider, underwent a cyber-hack that reportedly exposed the medical and financial information of 11…

Half the problem with protecting your enterprise from every hacker, phisher, visher and botnet herder is the helpful part of human nature, that wants to be…helpful. We’ve known for a very long time that the vast majority of successful cyber-attacks r…

The political world has been making global headlines around trouble over email usage. Former U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has been scrutinized for deleting 31,830 emails. Why?This attitude toward using one email address as a catch-all fo…

Customers are increasingly trading in their old, bloated, expensive on-premises email archives for cloud services. Over time, these last-century technologies will take their place in the history of computing – the world, technology and the needs of c…

It’s not David and Goliath. It’s David, without a slingshot, battling a Goliath who has recently beaten David’s more popular brother Google Apps.The launch of Amazon’s WorkMail makes perfect sense on paper. It should have an offering in the enterpris…

There’s been a spate of phishing attacks this month seeking to uncover the user credentials for users of various hosted email services. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and AOL have all been targeted.
While some reports of the Outlook.com phish seem to have inc…

2014 was a tough year for global computer security. New advanced threats, like spear-phishing, have been grabbing the headlines. Barely a week went by without news of a breach, and few companies are starting the year without a nagging sense of vulner…

This time last year futurologists were predicting the gentle evolution of the Big Data trend. Few would have predicted how dramatic the resurgence of security has been.Sure, there was a drumbeat of public security breaches like Snowden in play, but t…